Coping
by JonathonOB
Summary: What if Prue had killed a sister in the season 2 episode “Ms. Hellfire?” How would she cope? This is my attempt at showing what could have happened.
1. Chapter 1

**Coping

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**Disclaimer:** I don't own Charmed or any of the characters, I'm just borrowing them and having some fun, I'm not making profit from this, I wish I was, but alas, I'm not.

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**Chapter One:**

Lying in her bed, the sheets tangled tightly around her body, a dark haired woman tosses and turns, unable to stop moving, unable to find peace in sleep. What happened haunted her waking life and seemed determined to haunt her sleep too, ensuring that she could never forget what she'd done, never forget that she killed her sister.

_A leather-clad woman with black hair tied and tucked neatly back stood, valiantly fighting the two demons posing as her sisters. Sure, they had her sisters' memories, but they had fought warlocks who could drain people's memories and obtain the knowledge for themselves._

"_Prue, we're your sisters. Listen to me. You gave me the chicken pox," a younger woman said, her brown hair tied back, except for the bangs at the front._

"_You killed my sisters," Prue replied stubbornly, refusing to believe that the two younger women in front of her were her sisters._

_A faint red glow surrounded Prue, the eldest Halliwell sister and her form dissipated. Her sleeping physical self re-awakened with a gasp; almost as soon as her eyes opened she started up the stairs towards the two younger women. _Demons_, she thought_, not women, demons. Demons that killed my sisters._ Reaching the top of the stairs, Prudence motions towards a piece of wooden lattice work, the piece rips itself free and buries itself deep into Phoebe's chest. The girl with the pig-tails fell to the ground, her eyes closing. To the middle Halliwell, Piper, it all happened in slow-motion and she was powerless to stop it. She dropped to her knees and took Phoebe's hand. Instantly, tears welled up in her eyes and fell onto the dead form of her younger sister._

"_Come on, Phoebe, hold on. LEO! Please, Phoebe… she needs help," Piper called out for her whitelighter and lover._

_A flurry of blue and white lights forms next to the two younger sisters and from the lights a tallish man with light brown hair appears. He looks down to Piper and Phoebe and a whisper of something like 'oh God' escapes his lips. He drops down and pulls the piece of lattice out of Phoebe's chest and extends his hands over the wound, expecting the usual golden glow to escape the palms of his hands and heal the young witch. Nothing, not even a faint sparkle; what that meant sunk into Leo before it did Piper. _Phoebe's dead.

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"Why… why isn't it working?" Piper asked, her voice cracked from the almost overwhelming sadness, "Why?"_

"_Piper, Phoebe… Phoebe's dead", as soon as Leo finished his sentence, a loud, heart wrenching sob sounded from Piper. For such a small woman, she could sure make a lot of noise._

_Throughout all of this, Prue had stood in shock, horrified by what she'd done, she hadn't killed a demon, she'd killed her sister. She'd only realised that the woman she killed wasn't a demon when she didn't burst into flames or disappear or something like demons always do. After the shock had worn off, the guilt and sadness set in, it felt like her heart was being ripped from her chest. Prue ran the few steps to her baby sister's body and immediately knelt down to hug the body of Phoebe, only to be greeted by a swift punch to the jaw from Piper._

The beautiful, dark haired woman snapped upright in the bed, the sheets damp and tangled around her body, she touches the spot on her jaw where just a few months previously, her younger sister had punched her.

"Piper…" she whispers, tears in her eyes at the thought of what had happened to her sisters.


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer:** No ownership of Charmed, no profit from writing. Just borrowing the characters and having some fun.

**AN:** Sorry about taking so long to update, I've been suffering from a mix of writers block and exams.

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**Chapter 2:**

In a small loft in one of the less than pleasant areas of San Francisco, a woman with black hair and a porcelain white face woke up from a particularly vivid dream. The dream involved three rather beautiful women and later a man with light brown, almost blonde hair. The oldest, Prue, had killed the youngest, Phoebe. They looked to be not much older than the woman that lay in bed, struggling to recall the dream. All she could remember were names and faces, Prue, Phoebe and Piper, they all had similarities, they were definitely members of the same family. She had attended Phoebe's funeral, she saw Piper standing far away from Prue, both looking absolutely crushed. There were two men there too, Leo and an older man who were trying to get the two sisters to talk, but they failed miserably. She didn't know why she'd attended Phoebe's funeral, but she knew that she felt obligated to do so.

"Okay, Paige, it was only a dream," she said to herself, trying to calm herself. _But it felt so real, as if I'd lived it, as if it were me getting hit… as if I were the killer._

Paige pulled back the covers of the bed and padded carefully across the floor of the loft she rented. Almost silently, she opened the bathroom door and ran the cold water in the sink. After a few seconds of examining herself in the mirror, she splashed cold water against her face. In her mind she was comparing herself to the women in her dream; she noticed a few similarities, dark hair and eyes, high cheek-bones, but nothing that would clearly identify them as her family. Her biological parents had left her at a church when she was just a baby and she was adopted by the most amazing family, they loved each other fiercely and when her parents died in a car accident, she was devastated. Paige made it her mission to find out who her real parents were and she was looking into the Halliwell sisters – or more precisely: their mother, all that she had to go on was the church she was dropped at and the blanket she'd be left in.

Paige figured that she couldn't be related to the Halliwells because their mother died back in the seventies, which means that she would have had to have died when Paige was six months old. But there were noticeable similarities between herself and the Halliwell sisters; dark hair and eyes to match, high cheek-bones, she was as stubborn as a mule and she could almost always think up a sarcastic or witty reply to almost anything.

A dark alleyway. A glint of silver. A blood curdling scream and a flame. A silver blade dropped to the ground and a leather clad woman in her twenties picked it up off the ground and put it back into a small sheath at her waist. Her dark brown hair was pulled back tightly, showing off most of her face to the world, the only hair in her face were a few long bangs which were too short to be tied back. The woman turns sharply and exits the alleyway.

The woman was short, only a little over five feet tall, but still imposing and intimidating. She walked a short distance down the sidewalk to her black jeep. She started the engine and pulled off, after a few minutes of driving, her cell phone started to ring furiously, unrelenting in its efforts to get the witch to pick up the damn phone.

"Aw, crap," she muttered as she finally gave in and pulled the jeep over to the side of the road. She picked up the cell phone and answered it.

"Yeah?" she asked, almost violently, she was pissed off enough as it was; the demon she'd been tracking for the last two weeks had once again escaped. A few minutes of idle chit-chat passed by before the dark haired woman spoke out, anger laced through her voice, "What is it, Darryl?"

The voice on the other end of the line went quiet for a second before starting talking again, this time more rushed, almost urgent, the words, 'young woman', 'dead' and 'demonic' could still be made out clearly through Darryl's babbling. His speech once again returned to normal volumes and speeds as he pleaded with the woman on the other end of the line.

"Look, Piper, I wouldn't have called you if I didn't think it was… your kind of thing… please?" he was only a few seconds away from plain out begging, this was clear from his voice, he was desperate.

"Fine, meet me at the manor in thirty minutes," before waiting for a response, she disconnected the call and turned her cell phone off, she wasn't in the right frame of mind to be dealing with people calling her at this hour of the night or at all

Darryl hung up the phone, still shocked that the once shy and sweet Piper Halliwell had hung up the phone on him. She had once been so kind and warm, but ever since her sister's death, she'd become cold, distant and very angry, it was scary – to Darryl – how much of a change a person could go through in such a short space of time. The man picked up the case file that had been sat on his desk while he'd made the call to Piper and he made his way to the parking lot outside the police station, passing a few pleasantries with other officers and the like as he walked. Moments later he was in his car, the case file sat on the passenger seat next to him. He started the engine and made the drive to the Halliwell Manor on Prescott Street. When he arrived at the house, he saw Piper's Jeep was already parked up in the driveway; he parked his car behind Piper's vehicle and picked up the case file before getting out of the car. He walked across the front garden to the door and knocked twice, within seconds Piper Halliwell stood before him; she turned and walked back into the house. Darryl followed and closed the door behind him, he found Piper in the living room, waiting for him, although unlike when he visited the sisters before, there was no tea, coffee or cookies, just Piper with a stern look on her face.

"This is everything we have, killings occur every three days and each of the victims is missing on of their internal organs and they each had a symbol cut into them," Darryl relayed all of the information as quickly as possible before giving Piper the file.

Piper flicks through the file, scanning everything in there, occasionally her expression changed if she saw a particularly gruesome picture, she'd reached her conclusion as soon as she heard about the internal organs – she assumed this was just a sick freak… or a bunch of sick freaks trying to mimic one Doctor Frankenstein. But then she took in the part about the symbol carved into them and she practically knew that it could be something else, she wasn't stupid, she knew there was every chance that it was a demon or a group of demons trying to get their warm fuzzy feeling.

"I have a few ideas; I just need to check on a few things first," she said, getting up with the file in hand, without telling Darryl where she was going, she made her way upstairs to the attic, Darryl walking in her wake. Piper entered the attic and walked over to the famous Halliwell Book of Shadows, she begins flipping through the pages, quickly stopping when she spots the symbol engraved on each of the victims. The symbol belonged to a sect of demons whose leader had been vanquished centuries ago and they were trying to build a body for their leader to inhabit, or so it seemed.

"Seems that a group of demons have lost their leader and are making him a nice new body, but they've gotta use body parts from witches or the body won't be able to hold the power," she said simply, before Darryl could respond she continued "There's a spell in here to vanquish their leader and a potion to vanquish the minions, but the spell's a power of three spell and in case you haven't realised, we're two sisters short."

Daryl glances at Piper, a confidant look on his face as he holds his hands behind his back. "Are you sure you and Prue can't do it? I'm sure we can get her out of jail long enough for her to help you…" he stands there, his mouth hanging open as Piper cuts him off.

"Like hell you're bringing that murdering witch in my house," Piper says, shooting him a death glare as she does, she pauses, "close your mouth, Darryl, that's not a good look on you."

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**pepperdennis**, **wyarose**,** Writer formally known as Prujo** - I would like to thank you for your reviews, I'm glad to see some people out there are enjoying this. 


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